Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)
THE STRUGGLE AGAINST MARGINALIZATION- BEFORE AND AFTER WORLD WAR II. - In the service of talent - István Harsányi
scouting activities which come to the fore. In the domain of philosophy, he published only a short volume on Heinrich Rickert’s epistemology. He also published shorter essays on preaching and on the effects of Protestant theology on New Testament Studies. His books did not cause any great repercussions but his humanity, personality and precision easily made up for that. His pedagogical heart was what bound together the philosopher, the theologian, the public educator, the scout leader and the ethnographer in Kálmán Újszászy. IN THE SERVICE OF TALENT - ISTVÁN HARSÁNYI István Harsányi (1908-2002) was a genuine Patak student but one who was not able to make full use of his talents and reach the peak of his carrier while in Patak. History and its unfortunate turns intervened. He was born into a family which had a long history of pastors in the family. He was a student in Patak from his very first day in school until he graduated from the secondary school. It was in Budapest that he became a teacher - at the renown Eötvös College. He studied in Geneva for a year. His father was a professor in Patak in the history of literature department. Young Harsányi received a degree as a teacher of Hungarian and Latin but it was not the traditional disciplines of the colleges of the time which truly interested him. It was the relatively new discipline of psychology which fascinated him. His writings and work began to be more and more focused on expanding personal abilities - thus his scholarly interests were closely connected to his pedagogical responsibilities and calling. The first fifteen years of his carrier is directly tied to Patak. As a teacher of Hungarian and Latin in the secondary school, he was presented with the opportunity of putting his interest in psychology into practice. Building on such motivations, he soon encountered the issue of how to nurture talented students. The pedagogical role which today is referred to as ‘talent-coaching’, for him took form more within the concept of ‘talent protection’. The semantic difference reflects perfectly well that the task undertaken by Harsányi was closely linked to the College’s function as “a school for the poor” and fit in well with the rural life research missions in the 1930s. His method of nurturing talented students was not simply a collection of pedagogical-psychological techniques, it also functioned as assistance of a social nature. He published several articles in newspapers relating to his work and thus - much like Újszászy - he quickly became well-known. This is perhaps the reason for his leaving Patak, which he did upon his return there after having served one and a half years as a soldier and also being in captivity in the Don River area. In the few short years after the war when there was an attempt to establish a democratic form of government in Hungary, the MNER appointed him to be an adviser at the Ministry but, by 1948, he returned to his academic interests. He worked in the Institute of Psychology of the Hungarian Scientific Academy until he retired in 1969. Upon retirement, he stayed active and assembled and published a handbook in 1984 on the most important tasks in the nurturing of talented students. Ten years later, he finished writing and then published a book entitled The Protection of Talent. From the 1970s on, he István Harsányi giving a lecture
